High Plains Tango

  “Word was also that the women liked to watch him work. Said he always wore a red or yellow bandanna tied around his head and that he had real nice fingers. They’d peer out their windows at his long, lean body and guess that he had muscles in all the right places. One woman told her bridge club that Carlisle would run his hands over fine woods just like he was caressing a woman. That got him even more work once her comment was repeated in the right circles, though Carlisle had no idea that any of this was going on.

  “In general, then, this Cody, whoever he was, had a lot of influence in Yerkes County and somewhat beyond. People started rethinking their ways of building, though Salamander folks stuck with their double-wides and prefabs. Some said Carlisle’s tastes were ‘too California’ and ‘too expensive’ for them, although it was generally known that he’d spent less than $4,000 in building materials, furniture, and assorted houseware items in bringing his own project to completion. That figure worried some of the local lumberyards and building suppliers, but it needn’t have, since there’s always enough mud-brains around to pay full retail price for new green wood on the verge of warping, not to mention other similar amenities.

  “So Carlisle at least had the respect of a good many folks, even though he was not one of us in Salamander and never would be. He lived apart from us, geographically and mentally. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly or uppity or anything like that. You just somehow knew he had different priorities from the rest of the universe. You just knew it.

  “Still, he’d bring Gally into Leroy’s on Saturday nights when Gabe showed up with his accordion. Gabe’d play all the old polkas and two-steps and country tunes, just like people wanted. But about every tenth song he’d play one for himself. At first the yahoos would yell, ‘What’n hell’s that crap, Gabe?’

  “Then Gabe, the yellee, would look at the yeller and say real quietly, ‘It’s a tango, you dumb bastard.’ After that, they wouldn’t ask anymore.

  “See, Gabe’d been part of the liberation of Paris and had been left behind there to guard the place when the armies moved east. He’d spent every night in the little cafs where tangos were all the rage with aficionados. And he’d learned how to play them. Learned how to play them real well.

  “If the door to Leroy’s was propped open on a summer night, I’d sit next to my window and listen to Gabe play, the music drifting over the crowd, across the street, and up to me. I’d been in Paris, too. I’d heard the tangos. And I’d listen, remembering the French girl I fell in love with and . . .”

  The old man’s words angled down to silence, letting the thought go unfinished for a moment. He drank the last of the amber truth before him and clenched his jaw for a few seconds. Rolled his lips in toward each other, tightening them, ran his hand across thin gray hair.

  He looked up at me. “Christ, how I loved her—her name was Amlie—and she loved me, too. But Ike sent us on to Germany, and it was a long time before I could get back to Paris. I looked for her, for two months I looked for her, but she was nowhere to be found.

  “That was pretty much the end of my great passion. Oh, I eventually married a Livermore girl and had a daughter. But it was never the same. Never the same as lying in a Paris attic on a cold, rainy day with a woman you’d fight the whole goddamned German army for. Never the same.

  “So I always liked it when Gabe’d play the tangos. I’d listen and look down the main street of Salamander, way out to the countryside, watching the heavy blue twilight coming down. And I’d be thinking of Amlie and remembering how it was to be young, with rain on the rooftops of Paris and music playing.

  “Gabe also liked to play ‘Autumn Leaves,’ which originally was a French song. He’d treat it real gentle, stark, real sad. And I’d lie in my bed then. I’d lie there remembering Amlie and Paris, bringing back the feeling of her against me and wondering if she was still alive and what she might be doing, my eyes getting a little wet as I moved on toward sleep . . . still thinking about how it all kinda got away from me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  EARLY SUMMER, AND CARLISLE HAD THE HOUSE FINISHED except for some minor plumbing and electrical work he wanted to complete before his open house. That allowed him more time for Gally and other things he had been thinking about. In the spring, he’d come across plans for a five-string banjo in a copy of Mother Earth News. He laid up a prototype, studied it, and figured out some improvements. A vintage Gibson four-string was lying in its case at a Salamander garage sale. He cannibalized it for the tone ring and fitted the ring to a laminated maple rim he built up and finished on a lathe he rented for a day. The neck was hand carved out of a scrap of mahogany he’d picked up at a construction site in Falls City, and he laid the frets with micrometer accuracy.

  It sounded pretty good, real good, in fact, even though he didn’t play all that well, learning as he did from some books and tapes he’d ordered. Good enough for Dumptruck, apparently, since the tomcat didn’t complain too much. And Gally liked to hear Carlisle play and sing “Way Out There” or “Buffalo Skinners” on Saturday nights after they’d had a few beers.

  As the old man said, Carlisle was taken with the music of Gabe O’Rourke. Most Saturday nights, Gabe would bring a guitar player with him, a fellow who got around real well on the ebony fretboard of a forty-year-old Martin New Yorker. Both of them were sophisticated musicians, and that surprised and pleased Carlisle, who decided he had underestimated what was possible out there on the high plains.

  They played a fair amount of stuff familiar to the locals, but now and then they’d get lean and tight and play—Carlisle couldn’t believe it at first—a tango. The real street stuff, direct from the cafs of Argentina and Paris all the way to Leroy’s in Salamander.

  In Carlisle’s early years, a fellow named Luis occasionally dropped by Wynn McMillan’s house in Mendocino. Luis was a tango dancer, right down to his slicked-back dark hair and insolent ways. One evening, Carlisle chewed on a stick of red licorice and listened while Luis explained to the assembled members of Wynn’s salon how the tango was the one dance having universal meaning attached to it.

  According to Luis, the movements of the tango represented the male’s domination of the female. He argued furthermore that this dominion extended to the male’s brutal attitude toward nature, as contrasted with the nurturing instincts of females. Before he had finished, Luis had constructed a semicoherent theory of how the entire history and behavior of celestial space could be found in the movements unique to tango dancing.

  Carlisle was eleven when he heard Luis’s lecture, after which Luis had supported his notions by giving an exhibition in the living room. His partner was a voluptuous watercolorist, who was all too willing to be dominated, or so it seemed to Carlisle’s inexperienced eyes. When Carlisle looked back on it, however, what fascinated him most was that Luis had his own theory of the macrocosm. Granted, it was different from anything Carlisle’s science teachers ever mentioned, but at least Luis had a theory. Whether or not serious scholars could buy into it was a different matter, but it seemed to impress Wynn McMillan’s friends.

  As far as Carlisle could tell, and he was just old enough to guess about these things, Luis didn’t care half as much about his ideas as he did about tangoing off into a Mendocino evening with the watercolorist. And that’s exactly what he had done.

  A few years later, and in a foolish moment that made him cringe when he remembered it, Carlisle had the temerity to mention Luis’s notion to Cody Marx and asked if Cody thought there was anything to it. Cody had looked at him, puffed on his pipe, and said two things. First, Cody said his own ideas weren’t too well formed on either the universe or tango dancing. And second, he indicated he’d be grateful if Carlisle would just tango on out to the truck and retrieve the miter box. Carlisle had let it go after that.

  Gabe handled the tangos perfectly. Played right, as Carlisle liked to say, they had a certain spare, minimalist quality to them, very much like Sir Henry Wotton’s criteria for good workmanship in constr
uction: commodity, firmness, and delight. At first, the locals would hoot when Gabe started into one of the caf songs. After a while, though, they came to understand he was serious about the playing of them and quieted down when he reached back and played an old tango.

  Carlisle believed the accordion was a maligned instrument, possessing a distinctive voice that nothing could match. As the night moved along and Leroy’s cleared out a bit, Gally and Carlisle danced together, nice and slow. Gabe knew some of the old standards, so that endeared him to Gally. She’d request “Stardust” and “I Remember You” and “September Song,” the good tunes from her Flagstone Ballroom days. Gabe knew them all.

  Carlisle always asked for “Autumn Leaves,” one of his favorites. Gabe just tore it and him to pieces in the special way he treated it, caressing the tune in the same way Cody ran his hands over a cabinet in the moments he was finishing it. The guitar player would slide quietly in and out of minor seventh and augmented chords behind Gabe and would toss in little runs complementing what Gabe was doing on the accordion.

  The run of it was that Carlisle had settled down in a place called Salamander. He and Gally danced at Leroy’s and drove around the countryside, made love in Cody’s monument, and cooked for each other, made huge bags of popcorn and went to the Livermore drive-in theater. When she’d ask, he would take the five-string off the wall and roll into rudimentary clawhammer picking: “My ol’ man was a farmer on the Yerkes County line / Had eighty acres of bottomland and ramblin’ on his mind . . .”

  Once, on a whim, they cranked up his truck, stowed a couple of bags in the box under a tarp, and drove 984 miles to Las Vegas, where Gally had never been. Devil Jack had promised he’d take her sometime but never did.

  They stayed in a hotel called the Barbary Coast and played blackjack. In his wilder years, he and Budddy used to haul out of San Francisco for Vegas or Reno to play blackjack on a regular basis. Late on a Saturday afternoon, with Gally’s hand on his shoulder, he put down a green chip at a $25 table and ran it up to a little over $900 in ten minutes, playing head-to-head with a female dealer named Irene who could lay out a hand once every six seconds.

  To Carlisle’s way of thinking, a good run like that had both the purity of Bach and the juice of a modest sexual experience. When the cards turned against him, he cashed in and waltzed Gally down to a pricey store, where he bought her a new dress, shoes, the works. That night, with Gally looking slim and chic in her new outfit and Carlisle dressed in clothes left over from his Stanford days—gray tweed jacket, charcoal slacks, white shirt, and striped tie—they had dinner in a little restaurant approximating the kind of elegance Gally had only read about in magazines.

  After dinner, Carlisle had taken her dancing in a real nightclub, as he’d once promised to do. The best part for him of the blackjack, the dinner, the dancing, was seeing Gally enjoy herself, listening to her quiet laughter, watching her puzzle over the menu in Michael’s. They had made sweet love late at night, Gally all warm and giving and whispering in his ear about how content she was and how much she wanted him. He felt the same way and told her so. They pulled out for Salamander the following morning, singing along with the truck radio, watching the western cordillera moving toward them.

  Gally packed off to Spearfish in August, started classes, and wrote to Carlisle, “It’s wonderful. I feel like I’m eighteen again. I even went to a football game and sang the school fight song. Come visit me, carpenter. I miss you.”

  IT SLOWLY occurred to Carlisle McMillan that he had come to Salamander with a single purpose: to avoid the great economic colossus called progress. He wanted it to pass without noticing him, leaving him mostly whole and mostly sane in Yerkes County.

  So Carlisle thought he’d figured it out. Lay low, do good work and not too much of it, clean up your vocabulary, find a solid woman. Simplify, keep things uncomplicated. It seemed to be working.

  And he developed an interest in T-hawks. He had noticed the little hawks on the first day he walked his property. During the time Carlisle had been working on the place, they floated overhead and in the distance or perched in the high branches of the small forest across the road from him.

  Birds are one thing to the casual eye, feathers and whatnot, including some degree of magic and perfectly designed for what they do, which includes rustling up the interest of cats named Dumptruck. The little hawks of Yerkes County that caught Carlisle’s attention appeared to be immature birds of a much larger species. Yet they did not seem to be growing, and there were no larger hawks hanging around the small forest. Daily observations through Carlisle’s binoculars confirmed all of that.

  He bought a general guide to birds. Nothing. Then a more specialized one on raptors. Still nothing. On page 247 of a third book from the Falls City Library, hawks only this time, something appeared that caused him to shudder a little. There was a brief entry regarding a small predator called a Timmerman’s hawk, or T-hawk. The description of the bird noted it was about half the size of a red-tailed hawk. And the entry closed with this: “Once common in the northern Great Plains, now generally believed to be extinct due to habitat loss. For reasons unknown, T-hawks established an intense fidelity to a particular forest and periodically engaged in flocking behavior instead of the more common territoriality. Destruction of local habitat was tantamount to destruction of a T-hawk colony, since they refused to breed after that and would not migrate in search of new habitat.”

  Carlisle read the passage again and recalled his dislike of the word extinct from the first hearing of it. When you said the word out loud, the sound was like that of a hammer striking cold steel.

  He studied an artist’s rendering in the book, then watched the birds overhead through his binoculars, repeating both steps several times. That’s when he began to get excited.

  His next move was to poke around the science department at the community college in Falls City. One of the biologists was willing to hear him out. Skeptical at first, he eventually became mildly excited after listening to Carlisle and drove up Carlisle’s lane later that day, equipped with serious binoculars.

  He looked. Studied Carlisle’s hawk book and one of his own. Looked again. Carefully did all of that, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Carlisle, I think you may have made an important discovery,” Daryl Moore said, looking up from one of the texts and out toward the small forest. “The scientific community has believed for some time that the T-hawks disappeared decades ago. The little fellows, more properly known as Buteo timmermanis, were named after a nineteenth-century zoologist, H. L. Timmerman, who first identified them as a separate species. It looks to me like there’s a mating pair and some young ones in the little grove over there. Hawks are extremely territorial, and there’s not enough space in that patch of trees to allow more than one pair, though some flocking behavior apparently does occur at times. We must get an ornithological specialist out here right away.”

  Carlisle looked at Daryl Moore and said, “Tell you what, you take credit for finding them, if indeed that’s what they are. I’m doing my best to sequester myself out here, and the last thing in the world I want is to attend some academic convention and relate how I was sitting on my porch drinking beer, asking my cat, Dumptruck, for his considered opinion, and simply watching the little predators for the sheer hell of it.”

  The biologist started to protest, but Carlisle cut him off. “Mr. Moore, you’re the one who made the positive identification. I was just guessing. I’m not looking for tenure, so maybe this will do you some good, while it won’t do anything for me. Just say a friend tipped you off about some little hawks living in that grove and that your scientific sense of smell got the rest done.”

  “Oh, I really wouldn’t feel right about that.” Daryl Moore appeared a little astounded.

  “Okay, I’m now denying that I ever saw the birds before you came by. They’re all yours, Moore. Fly with it.”

  “Well . . . thank you, Carlisle. If you really feel that way.”
br />   “I do. Now go call your expert and coauthor a paper with him or her. You’ll all have fun with it. So will I, in my own way.”

  For a while, there was a lot of dust on the road in front of Cody’s monument. Mostly field vehicles, old Internationals and Jeeps, with lettering on the sides indicating they were from one scientific institute or another. Carlisle started to worry about this commotion disturbing the T-hawks, and Moore agreed, henceforth doing what he could to subdue the flood of hawk experts.

  Eventually, papers were written about the new find, but directions to the exact geographic location were withheld in the best interest of preserving what was probably the last refuge of the little raptors. And Carlisle no longer had to ask various scientists carrying notebooks and telephoto lenses longer than his arm to please move their vehicles so he could get in and out of his lane.

  Carlisle and Moore were interested in purchasing the parcel of land where the T-hawk forest was located. As it turned out, the federal government owned the land and was not interested in selling, since most of it was leased for grazing rights. But things were quiet, and the T-hawks seemed happy, so Moore and Carlisle shut down their efforts at that point. Moore, however, began working with the Raptor Coalition to get the T-hawks on the endangered species list.

  Ornithologists reasoned that if one pair of T-hawks was still in existence, there might be more. After an intensive search, two more pairs were discovered at locations within a hundred miles of Yerkes County. That was all, six adults and their young, a total of fifteen birds. The survival of the little hawks was a tenuous ride on the back of a dragonfly.

  Carlisle was a happy man. He had Gally and useful work to do. He had Timmerman hawks overhead, Dumptruck on the porch railing, and songs to sing. Plus, to be honest, he still had thoughts about Susanna Benteen from time to time. It was the way of all men. And Susanna Benteen clearly was a woman worth thinking about. In working together on the layout and content of his greenhouse, she and Gally had become friends. Sometimes in a summer dusk, he would come home from working in Falls City and find them in his hot tub out on the deck, drinking wine and mildly annoying Dumptruck by their very presence.